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This is great news. I'd be thrilled to support something that breaks the current duopoly in smartphone OSes. And I don't have high hopes for Mozilla's Firefox OS - I figure, if that team can't make sense of their browser, they don't belong in the OS business, much less the smartphone OS business, as far as I'm concerned.

Ha ha, I can appreciate the corporate-speak here (to truly appreciate the announcement you have to imagine the speaker pronouncing those words while simultaneously gargling a ballsack). I'm glad to see the reversion back to a more usable interface, and sorry to see management took a year to wake up and smell the coffee. I can only imagine page views were really dwindling there.

All is not lost. It was a year ago I left Slashdot over this Beta mess, and I've been active at three places since then: comp.misc on Usenet, www.pipedot.org, and www.soylentnews.org. Each has its community now and each is useful and interesting in ways that keep me coming back.

Not sure if I'll come back to Slashdot after all of this. Slashdot sometimes gets the stories first, but the stick they've poked in the eye of the community still kind of burns.

This is a good article and a good post, but the "Czar" thing isn't reflected in the article itself, so it's a bit of creativity on the part of the submitter.

The issue here is the mainstream media, which have seized on this and are whipping up people's emotions. No one expected anything else from tv "journalism" these days, but still, it's pathetic to see how it is playing out. I live in West Africa in a country that until recently was exposed to ebola. There was a patient living not more than 5 miles from my house. But life here is surprisingly calm and people are not panicking in any way, shape, or form.

Back in the States it's panic and mayhem, and as seen from abroad it looks like a big joke, which is exactly what news media have become. It's too bad.

On Reddit they had a contest to complete the sentence, "than have gotten ebola in the United States." One of the winners was, "More people have married Kim Kardashian..."

This technology has infinite uses. Say for example, there are some politicians in my country to whom I'd like to mail a bag of soggy dog poop. That might be a problem using traditional mail systems, but thanks to drone technology, you can just attach the bag of poop to a drone and pilot it over them as they're walking to work. Then, because the drone is probably busy with other demands, it's probably most efficient if, rather than landing, it just releases the attach hooks and drops that bag from its normal hovering altitude.

It was probably, intellectually, an interesting and challenging project. But that guy has just wasted his summer - and his code - building something no one actually wants. Have a look here - http://pipedot.org/story/2014-... where there's reporting about a growing systemd boycott taking place.

People don't like or want systemd and are increasingly organizing to avoid it. Non systemd distros - gentoo, slackware - plus FreeBSD, where I'll be migrating my home computer tonight after work - are starting to look pretty darned good to people again.

It's true there is a need for something more dynamic and responsive than the old init script system, but systemd is not it.

It's obvious American kids aren't reading enough, and the impact and consequences of not reading are pretty well known. But this is a cultural problem, not a technical problem, and proposing a hardware solution is not the right way forward and therefore won't work.

If kids wanted to read, they could do so basically for free already by getting a free library card and going from there. New hardware won't fix this.

I converted all my cassettes and DVDs and stuff, so I'm modern in that aspect. But on the protocol side: I still use FTP, telnet, IRC, and Usenet pretty extensively. I'm happiest at a text console, and not just because most Linux desktops piss me off something fierce.

Ha! Come join some other Slashcott refugees at comp.misc then. It's a pretty cool group. I also run a news server (with difficulty; INND is a royal pain in the arse): it runs the dictator.* hierarchy from http://dictatorshandbook.net/ (on Usenet you can connect to dictatorshandbook.net for Usenet access to that hierarchy).

Conversely, maybe we can now take snide, fucking smart-alecks and swap them into the body of a lardass so they can experience the humiliation and despair of being obese, so people like you can have a little more empathy for the human condition.

Meanwhile, every tranny on earth just got serious wood thinking about the potential of this technology.

It exists - sort of - and it's pretty cool. Check out www.squte.com. It's a web overlay to Usenet, permitting modding up and down and a lot more. Written by a guy who really loves Usenet but recognizes that it needs a web interface that provides the functionality people coming from systems like Reddit or Slashdot would expect.

It's ridiculous one company can just 'sell' its customers. Customers should have the choice. This is ridiculous and unfair and shows any semblance of 'regulation' of the field is a joke. Regulation in name only.

How about if I just sell a couple of 'bought' Congressmen? Because they weren't doing much anyway, other than pissing me off.

The fact that there are no "Fuck Beta" articles at Soylent is irrelevant. There are none on the "Daring Fireball" blog either, for obvious reasons - that's not where you'd expect to find them.

Furthermore, while Soylent doesn't yet have a huge number of comments it's clear there is a committed community of interested readers that like the site. So it's got lots of hope and lots of promise. I think it's early to boast "Soylent has better comments" but there's certainly proof the gang is heading in that direction.

A bunch of us defected to Usenet too, and are hanging out at comp.misc where there has to date been some really interesting conversation.

In sum, there are now several competing forums run by different groups in different ways. Let the best site win! And to win, you need good articles, healthy commentary, and a committed community hoping to keep "their" place a good one to visit. I think that's kind of the way it should be.

I've read a lot of those old "doomsaying" articles and in general they're interesting. But the Malthusians have been preaching the same apocalypses for a long time now and they've generally failed to come true.

I agree resource scarcity is essentially at the root of most of our problems, and over at http://www.dictatorshandbook.n... the discussion basically revolves around the idea that religious wars are a proxy for resource grabs, while bad governments either prevent more violence or promote it to achieve short-term political gains.

Bring on the world war and let's get back out of everyone's face. And let the MiddleEast burn, so we can do something nice on the ashes.

Hey speaking of predicting uprisings, I'll bet Dice's models never predicted so many Slashdotters would bail out in disgust their commentary on the new Beta was ignored! See you on Usenet at comp.misc.